We propose a family of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods whose performance is
unaffected by affine tranformations of space. These algorithms are easy to construct
and require little or no additional computational overhead. They should be
particularly useful for sampling badly scaled distributions. Computational tests show
that the affine invariant methods can be significantly faster than standard MCMC
methods on highly skewed distributions.
Keywords
Markov chain Monte Carlo, affine invariance, ensemble
samplers